Ambition & Avarice: 1st Edition

Ambition and Avarice is an action-adventure roleplaying game with an easy-to-understand OSR chassis. The characters are rough and ready adventurers. No more moralizing paladins and clerics. Even the religious characters are willing to get a little dirty in the pursuit of their goals.The game brings a fresh look to medieval fantasy with 10 unique classes that each bring something special to the table. Each class features;

- Expertise in a class-specific task; like the Sorcerer's counterspelling ability or a Cultist's ability to sacrifice humanoids to curry favor with their god.

- Identification of something in the world; like the Priest's ability to identify divine symbols and beings or the Savage's ability to spot weakness in combat.

- Companions to serve as henchmen; like the Knave's ability to recruit spies or the Conjurer's ability to create imps to serve them.

The five magic-using classes have a varied selection of new and exciting spells. There are easy methods to create your own enchantments, raise unique undead to serve you, or craft cursed items to give to your enemies. The non-magical classes have their own rich choices and don't fade away in importance as the magical characters advance in level.

These classes can then be combined with 10 classic fantasy races; from elves and dwarves to orcs and lizardfolk. You can combine them however you wish, creating everything from goblin knights to dwarven brigands.

The entire package is designed to allow quick character generation and presented in a format that is clear and easy to read. The text is packed with expanations of not just the rules, but the reasons behind the rules. It is an ideal choice to hand to a new player who is looking to get into the great game, but turned away by thick rulebooks with byzantine organization. The adventuring mechanics are also OSR compatible and allow easy integration with a variety of old school campaign material. You can pick up this game, grab an old module, and get playing in a very short amount of time.

Three years later and a handful of change, this is still one of my favorite OSR style games. I hope the author releases a future version based upon The Black Hack system. That would certainly rock my socks off.

Michael HFebruary 07, 2015 7:57 am UTC

PURCHASER

Um...no magic items either. It gives the impression of being a complete old-school game and it is beautifully written but it looks like the author ran out of steam before he finished the project. Shame.

I'm fairly sure I wouldn't have bought it if I'd known but ti does have some really good bits. Shame.

Nadav BFebruary 07, 2015 12:52 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Reply about both your comments, as someone who ran the game for several sessions and took the time to get some prep done:
The lack of monsters is negligible at best. You are given way more than sufficient tools to produce any monster you'd like easily.
As for the lack of magic items, the unspoken assumption is that this is an OSR game, making magic items both rare and unique. Thus, it is assumed that you either draw inspiration from the spells or make up your own, with little regard to anything but rule of cool.
At least that's how I experienced the game and saw it.

Michael HFebruary 06, 2015 6:55 am UTC

PURCHASER

Um...loads of spells. No monsters. Odd.

Nadav BOctober 01, 2013 10:05 am UTC

PURCHASER

@Malcolm M.: I saw that glaring hole in the class lineup as well and offer you this in response: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WQzinPO4tgJT659lwF5C-iA0jo1IZzVk-OOgNPH_cds/edit
It's a Warrior class I've written up. I think it fills the niche quite well and stacks up well against the other melee classes.

The other reviews do a great job of listing the awesomeness of this ruleset so I'll just list what I love about it personally. Feels totally compatible with my old school D&D rules. I thin you could run this with almost no conversion, [...]

A brilliant game, worth every penny if you want a simplified-yet-versatile fantasy rpg, but one oversight (sadly) keeps it from being the go-to game for my future fantasy gaming -- one of the core archetypes for this style of gameplay appears to be mis [...]

I've ran a couple of sessions of this game so far and have enjoyed them like I haven't enjoyed RPGs in a while. The game accomplishes several things I've seen done only marginally well in other games, OSR and otherwise.
The classes are all prett [...]

I've read and played through a plethora of retro-clones/variants and A&A is one of the most refreshing to read - it isn't a cut-n-paste job, the author has balanced easily-remembered streamlined rules with cool ideas in a well-laid-out PDF. His ent [...]

All the choice you want in playing without the slowdown of clunky rules I read this in Beta and really liked it, and now that its in the !st edition i like it even more. dungeon throws are a very unique thing, everybody has them at differ [...]

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